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Bernard Moitessier set out to on the first race sailing single handed, non stop around the globe. It is most likely that he would have won the race if he had not, upon reaching the Atlantic, forfeited the race and turned South to head back around again.

Mooring in Tahiti and watching the development of the island, he writes:

Lots of people believe that the bulldozer and the concrete mixer don’t think. They’re wrong: they do think. They think that if they don’t have any work to do, they won’t earn any money, and then their slaves won’t be able to buy the fuel and oil they need to go on living and go on thinking serious thoughs.They think human beings are pretty retarded, still making their babies in joy and love and pain. Their procreation technique is much more efficient: they work flat out without ever getting tired, and taht means profits, and their slaves hurry to make more bulldozers and concrete mixers which are born fully grown, ready to work without wasting a minute. And what they think really had is they had better hurry up and get the robot age going before man catches on. (The Long Way, 1971)

Who runs whom? Do we run our technology? Or does our technology run us?

Metric echoes this idea in “Handshakes”:Buy this car to drive to workDrive to work to pay for this car